A discussion of knowledge management that goes above and beyond technology.

knowledge management

From our grandparents’ time back to the dawn of oral history, we used the phrase “once upon a time” to indicate a long time ago. Then we started to use some variant of the phrase “back when dinosaurs roamed the earth.” Again, this is not a literal indication of time, but rather a figurative one. (If you want to be literal, they walked the earth between 230 million years ago and 65 million years ago. In other words, a long, long, LONG time ago.)

When dinosaurs roamed the web

When you are considering such long spans of time, you naturally expect massive changes. Now that life is speeding up, however, we are experiencing massive changes over a much shorter period of time. Take, for example, the changes that have occurred since “dinosaurs roamed the web.” A recent article by Jamie Carter, The internet is everywhere – but where has the web gone‘ summarizes the sweep of these changes nicely:

“The web started out as a content repository where search was the key enabler,” says Richard Moulds, VP Strategy, Thales e-Security. “Web 2.0 was about user-driven content and social media was the big enabler, and Web 3.0 is all about personalisation where different users experience different things based on their history and preference. For this transition, big data is the key enabler – without massive data analytics, personalisation on a grand scale is not possible.”

Leveraging collective knowledge: conversation-based knowledge sharing, in which the role of leaders is to convene strategic conversations.

These two views do not map exactly. For example, Nancy Dixon suggests that social media tools (i.e., Web 2.0) would be useful in leveraging collective knowledge across physical or geographical boundaries. In her view, social networking technologies provide “greater organizational transparency and give rise to more diverse perspectives in the organizational conversation. The use of crowd sourcing, cognitive diversity, and predictive markets draw on a wider base of thinking, both internally and externally, that increases organizational innovation.” It would be interesting to see how she might think about the personalization capabilities of Web 3.0 and its place in knowledge management.

Escaping the dinosaur age

Even in the absence of a neat one-to-one comparison, it is still useful to take a moment to consider where your organization’s knowledge management efforts are focused today. Starting with Nancy Dixon, where is your organization’s KM program with respect to the Three Eras of Knowledge Management? Are you still in the first era, trying to build a foundation of good content management? Or have you moved to more conversation-based knowledge sharing?

Now, take a look at your intranet. Where is it in terms of Richard Moulds’ breakdown of Web 1.0, Web 2.0 or Web 3.0. Are you still focused on simply providing as much centrally vetted content as possible? Or have you moved beyond that to include a wide-range of user-generated content. Better still, do the users of your intranet or knowledge management program have the benefit of thoughtfully personalized resources that allow them to focus on the things that matter most to them at any given time?

In law firms, for example, some rudimentary personalization occurs based on role (e.g., partner, associate, staff), client, practice group and location. Do you go beyond these basics to provide personalization based on search terms, user behavior, talent management (e.g., providing content that supports a user’s development goals) and time management (e.g., providing content that fits with a user’s current time management challenges or opportunities)?

If you are stuck in the stage of basic content wrangling and presentation, you are living when dinosaurs roamed the web. Isn’t it time for you to move into the 21st century?

What is knowledge management’s core function? Are we to be guardians or guides?

When I started in law firm knowledge management, my role was fairly clear: I was to be a guardian. What does this mean? My job was to gather and guard the intellectual capital of the firm. I was to help filter the useful material from the less useful, put the useful material in a central location, and then provide easy access to it based on the firm’s confidentiality rules and permissions structure. While this was a fair amount of work, it was not hard to grasp. Further, it fit nicely with one of the traditional roles of law firms: gatekeeper of esoteric knowledge. Just as law firms accumulated knowledge of the law and then provided it to clients, I was to provide the same service to the lawyers who were my internal clients. In a sense, I was to be the firm’s gatekeeper of gatekeepers.

In many law firms today, this is still the primary function of their KM personnel. They hunt down or create legal content. They cajole or harass fee-earner colleagues to draft, review and approve materials for the central repository of firm crown jewel documents (e.g., model documents, practice guides, matter process maps, etc.) They tangle with IT in an attempt to create a user-friendly environment for that central repository (e.g., an intranet/portal or even a simple wiki). And once they have some content in this collection, they then need to start the work of finding fee-earning colleagues who will actually keep those materials current and relevant. On the best of days, being a KM guardian is a sisyphean task.

Being a KM guide is no less time-consuming, but I would suggest that it is far more productive.

What is a KM guide? The role of a KM guide is not that different from a tour guide: identifying the trail, illuminating the path, providing context, enabling fellow travelers to discover and learn from the experience. The pathways in question here are not physical pathways, but rather pathways to learning and knowledge. Accordingly, rather than saying “this document contains what you need to know,” we would instead say “this how others in a similar situation found what they needed to know.”

Before you dismiss this as an inefficient, roundabout method, consider the following example. If you come to me looking for information and I hand you something off-the-shelf, generally one of two things will happen: either it will be exactly what you were looking for (and you will thank me profusely) or it will not be what you were looking for (and you will wonder why you wasted your time). This is the experience many people have when they go to their intranet looking for information.

There is also a variant on the second experience that can be profoundly aggravating: they find something that is almost, but not quite, what they were looking for. So they have to reverse engineer it to figure out how much they can salvage and how much they must create from scratch. However, because there rarely are any “reverse engineering instructions” attached to the document, they often have to reinvent the wheel in order to meet their goal. Talk about a colossal waste of time! Yet it goes on every day in organizations around the world.

Now are you ready to consider an alternative?

What if we had a map of the path the earlier traveler took to their destination. You would know that you didn’t need to go as far as they did, but you could follow the map until you reached the point where you had to take a turn onto another road. Obviously, your path on that other road would be beyond the map you were given, so you would have to figure that part out for yourself. However, that would be the ONLY part you would have to create from scratch. For the earlier part of your journey, you would simply have to follow the map rather than creating your own trail (machete in hand) through the undergrowth.

The beautiful thing about working with journey maps rather than destination documents is that these maps show the next traveler where the previous trailblazer was trying to go and how they did it. Then the newcomer can determine how best to plan their own journey. In doing so, they will build on the work of others rather than being forced to reinvent the wheel.

While I have not yet had a chance to test the software, there is a new tool that promises a similar experience by mapping the research path people take through the internet in pursuit of answers to life’s burning questions. Twingl’s Trailblazer is an extension to Chrome that shows what sites you visited and, in the process, reveals something of your thought process. There are several benefits to this approach:

You can step away from your research and then return later without having to repeat steps.

You can review your map to see where you might have missed something or taken an unproductive turn.

You can share your map with others — thereby transferring both the knowledge of where you ended up, as well as how you got there.

Now imagine if we could create similar maps of how the lawyers in our firms arrived at certain judgments, negotiation stances or language in documents. Then we could share within the firm a much deeper and better quality of knowledge — not only what we decided, but how we got there. These knowledge pathways set one lawyer apart from another. Aggregated, they could set one law firm apart from the others.

KM personnel have a role to play here by being KM guides. A KM guide helps lawyers uncover and map their journey. Then that KM guide can maintain and share those maps. Just as we groom cross-country ski trails, a KM guide keeps the knowledge trails within an organization accessible, well-tended, free of debris and easy to follow. Over time you will have a collection of overlapping maps that build on the work of earlier generations of lawyers and then extend the collective learning in new directions. What a fantastic outcome for a KM effort!

In an era of disintermediation, it makes less sense to be the guardian of information that often can be found by a variety of means in multiple places. It is more productive to help all the people in your firm rise to a higher point on the learning curve by building systematically on the knowledge maps of colleagues. You can accomplish this by being a KM guide.

This is a question we ask often. Unfortunately, it is a question we do not always answer correctly. Sure, we might identify the obvious people, based on our personal experience or knowledge. However, we occasionally forget some key people, and there may be yet others of whom we are completely unaware.

As a result, we share knowledge with the smallest possible group. But that group may not even be the right group. We may explain our approach as well-intended efficiency or even a bid for security. However, at the end of the day, by failing to ensure that information reaches the right people, we have ensured that any decisions we make will be made on the basis of incomplete information.

Is it any wonder so many organizations make so many mistakes?

These are real questions in the context of law firms and law firm knowledge management departments that are trying to thread the needle between firm-wide knowledge sharing and concerns about protecting confidential information. While I do not want to minimize in any way the importance of protecting client-confidential information, I wonder if in our zeal to limit access to information we are actually depriving ourselves and our clients of the ability to make decisions and provide advice based on complete information.

It is instructive to see how another organization faced this challenge of holding knowledge tightly versus sharing it widely. The organization I have mind plays for stakes that are very high indeed. It is the US military. In his TED talk (posted below), General Stanley McChrystal explains how he came up through the ranks in a security-conscious, need-to-know organization and yet came to understand the importance of sharing knowledge beyond the small group he initially identified as those who need to know. He describes the need for information security as something that was “in the DNA” of the military. He speaks of the organizational silos that served the purpose of ensuring information was kept safely contained.

Despite that security-conscious DNA, General McChrystal came to a startlingly different answer when he asked the question, “Who needs to know?” He discovered that “in a tightly coupled world,that’s very hard to predict.It’s very hard to know who needs to have informationand who doesn’t.” So they changed their approach. They started asking “Who doesn’t know, but needs to be told as quickly as possible?” In fact, they went so far as to start knocking down organizational silos physically by having cross-functional teams work together in “situation awareness” rooms in which they could share, discuss and disseminate information quickly.

The results were impressive:

…as we passed that information around,suddenly you find that information is only of valueif you give it to people who have the abilityto do something with it.The fact that I know something has zero valueif I’m not the person who can actuallymake something better because of it.So as a consequence, what we did waswe changed the idea of information,instead of knowledge is power,to one where sharing is power.It was the fundamental shift,not new tactics, not new weapons,not new anything else.It was the idea that we were now part of a teamin which information became the essential linkbetween us, not a block between us. [emphasis added]

Admittedly, the army does not serve financial services companies who insist on rigorous data security audits and will withdraw their business if you do not meet their demands. The army does not have clients who refuse to allow any of their information to be shared within the firm even as they expect that they will have the benefit of learning and experience derived from the firm’s other clients. The army does not have owners who have grown up with a need to protect confidentiality that goes beyond professional obligation owed to a client, to cover even the most basic information about the health of the firm.

On the other hand, the army does make life and death decisions on a daily basis. And in this context, the army has learned that if it wishes to have effective teams that make good decisions, it must share information so that information becomes the “essential link” and not a “block” to team effectiveness and good decisionmaking.

Given the army’s example, isn’t it worth thinking harder about how to share knowledge safely and efficiently within law firms? At a minimum, it must mean moving beyond simply asking “Who needs to know?”

So why does this matter for knowledge management professionals? Aside for providing an excuse for additional gifts, it also serves as a timely reminder that things are not always as they seem. While one perspective (in this case, the Madison Avenue perspective) may be telling you the main event is over, looking at things from a different perspective (in this example, the Christian liturgical calendar) suddenly reveals that the festive season rightly should continue for much longer than you might have expected.

Similarly, in our work it is too easy to declare events or projects a success or failure and then turn our attention to other things. But have we actually fully explored and understood what happened?

Have we drawn all reasonable lessons from our experience?

Have we found useful and effective ways to share our learning with others?

Have we improved our systems and processes to reflect that learning?

Is our decision-making better because of that learning?

Have we squeezed every last drop of juice out of the experience?

The job of knowledge management professionals is to make the system work better — not to condemn the system, our colleagues and ourselves to making the same mistakes over and over again. However, if you treat your projects or matters as one-off events — like Madison Avenue treats Christmas — then you miss a golden opportunity to derive the fullest possible value from each experience.

In 1984, the PNC Bank established the Christmas Price Index by calculating the cost in present-day dollars of actually giving someone each of the gifts enumerated in the carol, The Twelve Days of Christmas. The cost in 1984 dollars of giving one set of each of the gifts was $12,623.10. The “true” cost of Christmas (i.e., giving as many sets of each gift as indicated by the repeated lines of the song, that is 364 items) was $61,318.94 in 1984. By comparison the cost in 2014 of one set of gifts was $27,673.21 while the cumulative cost of the gifts as repeated was $116,273.06.

While PNC has provided this fun new tradition (as well as a game and other resources for children) to help show the cost of the 12 Days of Christmas Approach to gift giving, I’m not aware of any data that show the true cost to KM professionals and their organizations of their failure to spend the extra time to wring every possible lesson out of every experience.

While the 12 Days of Christmas traditionally end on January 5 (according to the western liturgical calendar), I wonder if a KM calendar should extend them to the entire year? After all, can we or our organizations afford not to take advantage of every gift of learning that comes from experience?

In my previous post on Middle-Earth Communication Methods, I wrote about the importance of varying the way we communicate. And, I gave some examples from Delta Airlines and Air New Zealand (official airlines of middle-earth) that illustrate how a little imagination and humor allowed them to communicate their crucial safety messages more effectively.

Michael Foster, writing on Melcrum.com, takes the importance of variety in communications even further. In his view, when communications are predictable, their intended audience simply tunes them out:

Safe equals predictable

Human beings process information every second of every day. What we do with this data varies, but in many cases we use it to make tiny, subconscious predictions about what will happen next. At its simplest, this can be illustrated by watching the flight of a thrown ball. Our brain automatically estimates the ball’s future trajectory based on its path up to that point, thus allowing us to catch it (or try to).

This process works in exactly the same way when we listen to someone speaking, with our brain constantly making and revising predictions on where the sentence, point or speech is leading. An engaging presentation tells us something we don’t know in a way in which the outcome becomes unpredictable. The result is that this forces us to pay attention. However when we hear a familiar presenter, speaking in a way we recognize about a message we have heard before, our brain quickly tells us we already know the outcome and maintaining focus becomes much harder. Most of the time this happens subconsciously, but it is a vital process for … communicators to be aware of. [emphasis added]

Predictable equals shortchanged KM

In her comment to my previous post, Vishal Agnihotri (CKO of Akerman LLP) reminded me that effective communications are a critical part of effective change management. Further, effective change management is a requirement of effective knowledge management. So if you stick to predictable messages, you will have a hard time engaging your audience sufficiently to convince them to embrace the changes embodied by your KM initiatives. At that point, it’s game over.

There is, however, an alternative path if you are willing to employ some middle-earth methods. Introduce a little humor and imagination into your communications. Feed the curiosity of your audience so that they stayed tuned to your messages.

When you find yourself stuck in a communications rut, befriend your colleagues in the marketing department of your firm. Ask them to provide some strategic and tactical advice on your own department’s communications. By this I mean more than simply asking them to design a pretty logo or slick internal newsletter. Rather, give them free rein over your text and images too. Ask them what they would recommend you do to incorporate into your communications those vital elements of surprise and delight that capture the attention of your audience. In fact, if you’re serious about sharpening up your department’s communications, see if you can bring a marketing/communications person onto each KM project team from the beginning. By involving them early, you can bake an effective communications strategy into your project plan. In this way, you give yourself a fighting chance of actually getting your message across.

And in those moments when the appeal of dull but safe corporate communications seems most enticing, gather up your courage and then summon your inner hobbit. As Gandalf the Grey observed:

“Hobbits really are amazing creatures. You can learn all that there is to know about their ways in a month and yet, after a hundred years, they can still surprise you.”

It’s graduation season again. Families all over the country will travel to academic institutions near and far to celebrate the completion by their loved ones of a course of study. Part and parcel of the process are the obligatory speeches*: the largely forgettable speeches filled with unwanted advice rendered in solemn tones by local worthies; the largely inane speeches filled with low humor and insider references to class jokes delivered by representatives of the graduating class. We sit through these events time and time again because we know it is important to mark the occasion.

A senior manager of a law firm knowledge management department recently told me that one of the challenges KM staff members face is that a fair measure of their time is spent on routine maintenance tasks. Given this reality, one day slips into another, without much sense of meaningful accomplishment. Granted, everyone notices when a maintenance failure results in a crisis, but rarely do we ever celebrate a crisis-free day. His advice was to ensure that in our periodic reporting efforts we take time to note when these routine maintenance chores are executed well or when conscientious effort expended on these tasks results in a crisis-free day.

If our KM systems rely on the faithful execution of maintenance work, it only makes sense to support these efforts. Rather than using sticks, consider using carrots. Just like we help celebrate academic achievement periodically, we should celebrate the less glamorous side of our professional responsibilities as knowledge management personnel. For the sake of our KM systems and our own professional satisfaction, we should remember to mark the occasion. After all, no ones really wants to deal with the crisis that results when we ignore the value of routine maintenance.

An upcoming client engagement requires that I consult Yoda. Really. (I love my job!) Accordingly, I’ve spent some time recently researching the wisdom of Yoda and have discovered that his insights are beneficial to padawan learners in a variety of disciplines, including knowledge management.

“The fear of loss is a path to the Dark Side.” This insight of Yoda’s can be read as a warning about many of our information management (or, more properly, information mismanagement) practices. The fear of loss of critical data or documents can lead to over-zealous security measures that hobble the reasonable flow of information inside and outside an organization. It also can lead to information hoarding by individuals or the desperate creation by KM personnel of ad hoc databases and document collections. To see if you are on the path to the Dark Side, ask the following questions:

How many knowledge collections or databases exist in your organization?

How many are actively maintained?

Are these materials findable by most people in the organization?

Of the materials contained in those collections or databases, what percentage are routinely used?

Do the personnel in your firm participate in and support information management practices that enhance appropriate access to key information?

Is key information available for general use in shared repositories or systems of record, or are they hidden in private folders or storage systems?

Are your security measures designed to inflict the least possible harm on the flow of information inside and outside the organization?

Do your security measures cause inefficiencies or other costs due to the unavailability of key information?

“You will find only what you bring in.” Yoda was right about this as well. If he were a 20th-century creature rather than a 900-year old Jedi Master, he might have phrased it as “garbage in, garbage out.” This precept of Yoda’s is particularly apt when considering your organization’s intranet:

What percentage of the content is current?

What percentage of the content is used on a regular basis?

Do you have a retention policy that is enforced with respect to intranet content?

Are we employing the best possible means known to us to facilitate the flow of critical information in the organization?

Have we identified and addressed the barriers to knowledge sharing in the organization?

What new things are we learning about the discipline of knowledge management that can help us better light the way for our colleagues?

“You must unlearn what you have learned.” Knowledge management as a formal discipline is not all that old. However, it is old enough to have produced new insights that cause us to question some of the principles that we once thought were eternal verities. If you haven’t been following the development in thought within the discipline, then you haven’t been doing your job. It isn’t enough simply to maintain the intranet and call that KM. Be sure that you and your colleagues know what’s new in KM theory and practice, and let that guide you as you constantly evaluate your own KM systems and practices. It is only by engaging with new (and sometimes challenging) ideas that you understand what it is you need to unlearn before you can truly learn.

In some law firm knowledge management circles it is fashionable to disdain theory in favor practical realities. To be honest, there was a time in my career when I chose to ignore theory and focused instead on learning the lessons provided by the school of hard knocks. The problem was that while those lessons were abundant, they often were rather painful. Further, while they made sense in the context of my experience, that experience was by necessity limited and I couldn’t always safely extrapolate from that specific experience to develop a solid theory of more general application.

Once I acknowledged these shortcomings, I had to find a better way. And that way led me back … to theory. As I began reading, I discovered that I was not the first to experience certain KM challenges and I learned that some of the “clever” solutions I was contemplating had been tried and discarded by smarter minds and braver souls than mine. That’s when it dawned on me that, at its best, the KM literature could save me from a world of hurt by allowing me to learn from the experiences of others.

That made me a convert. Yet even still, I wasn’t entirely sure how far I could safely take KM theory and apply it to the real world.

In the last few months, I’ve been part of a group testing some KM theory and discovering once again that there is a lot KM can teach the real world. In particular, I’ve been testing what I’ve read in the KM literature about social capital and behavior in social networks. Together with my stellar partners Alessandra Lariu, Claudia Batten, John Weiss and Matt Null, I’ve taken those theories out for a trial run in the world of mobile apps. On December 31, a company we co-founded released a mobile app called Broadli. This app helps users sort their cluttered collection of contacts to uncover their trusted network. Then the app helps users activate their trusted network to move forward the projects that matter most to them. Along the way, participants create networks of generosity in which they “pay it forward” by providing a helping hand to people within their extended network.

Thanks to a fabulous feature article in Fast Company and some energetic social media activity, Broadli has become an idea that has captured the imagination of thousands of users. And we hope that many thousands more will see the light.

So if you’ve been wondering why I haven’t been blogging lately, now you know. If you have an iPhone 5 and would like to be part of these networks of generosity, please download the app and start using it. To be sure you get the full experience, invite members of your trusted network to join in as well. We welcome your participation and your comments.

[These are my notes from Columbia University’s 2013 summer residency program for its Masters of Science in Information and Knowledge Strategy. Since I’m publishing them as soon as possible after the end of a session, they may contain the occasional typographical or grammatical error. Please excuse those. To the extent I’ve made any editorial comments, I’ve shown those in brackets.]

NOTES:

What’s the Key to Good Decision Making? The most critical element to effective decision making within an organization is knowledge sharing. But this requires a culture that encourages knowledge sharing as a matter of policy AND gives people the necessary support to take the time to seek out knowledge and then share it. This kind of organizational culture helps me overcome the fear of asking and it gives my counterpart reasons to answer.

Knowledge Management as a Discipline. One of the great challenges is that the name “knowledge management” can be misleading. However, if you can get past the name, the practices it encompasses can be hugely helpful for an organization. KM is the single best antidote to the greatest threat to good corporate decision making: information hoarding. Helping people understand the value of knowledge sharing and collaboration is a huge part of the role of KM professionals. In addition, they need to help people in the organization handle the constant pressure of information overload.

Where should KM Live? Much depends on the organization. In a balkanized organization, KM should live within the part of the organization that has the ability to take action. Ideally, KM should be a center of excellence with the power to provide KM goodness on an enterprise-wide basis. In addition, there should be KM competency within each business unit. It’s important that prudential functions (e.g., risk, HR, audit, knowledge) report up to a CXO, even though personnel may be embedded in business units. Without the vertical reporting lines, it can be hard to maintain enterprise-wide standards.

KM and IT. The relationship between knowledge management and IT is critical. They need to be close collaborators, but the panel agreed that KM function should not be buried inside the IT function. IT’s focus is primarily on the tools. KM’s focus in more on methodology. That said, if you have a generous view of each other’s areas of expertise and don’t get too hung up on turf warfare, it is possible to bring out the best in your collaborators in other key functions. One panelist pointed out that there is (or should be a difference) between thinking about the organization’s information (CIO) and thinking about the organization’s tools (CTO).

*Disclosure: This link is through my Amazon affiliate account and may generate income to me.

Here’s a newsflash: texting while walking is dangerous. Big surprise? Hardly. Yet, people all over town persist in texting while walking — or worse still — while jaywalking.

When did we decide that we were immortal? Is it that we believe accidents happen to other people? Or have we finally found a behavior that is stupid enough to earn each of us a personal Darwin Award?

Thankfully, where there is a need, someone is bound to provide a responsive product or service. In this case, an enterprising soul identified an emerging market of incredibly foolhardy people and has developed especially for them the Walk and Text app (available for iPhone and Android). Really.

How does it work? Using your smartphone’s camera to see what’s coming, the app provides a transparent screen on which you can compose your text. As you’re writing, the transparent screen lets you can see what’s ahead of you. Genius.

If you don’t want to purchase this product, you could always try the Seeing Eye People service. As you will see in the videos below, the See Eye People gave texters the opportunity to focus their undivided attention on their texting. As their clients were texting, the Seeing Eye People cleared a path in front of them and warned them of obstacles ahead. Genius.

Okay. If you’ve read this far, you’ll have realized that you can’t really hire Seeing Eye People on New York City streets. But weren’t you tempted?

In a similar vein, would you like an app or service that saves you from your other self-destructive behaviors? Something that warns you before you fail to share vital information with a colleague? Something that reminds to you check the knowledge base before you send a request for information to everyone in your organization? Something that helps you find what you need?

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This publication contains my personal views and not necessarily those of my clients. Since I am a lawyer, I do need to tell you that this publication is not intended as legal advice or as an advertisement for legal services.